the scale upon which leadership can utilize this cogent spring of action. We have friendly societies, welfare organizations of many kinds, civic associations, national leagues, race congresses, resting on a fellow feeling or consciousness of kind that makes all their members more disposed to act together and their leaders correspondingly more effective. We live in an age of collective action, and what could never be accomplished if leadership were dependent upon inertia and deference becomes easy when it can work upon sympathy. Sympathy operates more actively than the former springs of obedience. It not only provides ready support for leadership, it creates a demand for leadership. It is quicker than reason, it is more wholesome than fear. Whatever may be the case with leaders, for followers it is the most reliable guide to action that is available. The impulses to which sympathy gives rise may not always, judged by their effects, be good. Lynch law is as much a product of such impulses as child labor legislation. But whatever may be thought of the character of its effects in particular cases, there can be no doubt that sympathy on the part of those who are led always makes leadership more effective.

(4) Fear A fourth cause of obedience is fear. Intimidation and violence will, without doubt, accomplish results which are unattainable by purely pacific leadership, no matter how energetic. Children who can never learn to love their parents can learn to fear them; parents who are not lovable can establish at least an imperfect rule by force. Unruly scholars learn that behind the gentle schoolmistress stands the stern truant officer. What is true in the home and in the school is true elsewhere. Fear is the promptest and most direct means of restraining the violent and the vicious in any community. Force is naturally, therefore, one of the earliest expedients when established authority is threatened by insubordination. Historically, it was probably

the first means of establishing authority outside the family.

Fear is always a tempting instrument for procuring obedience. Since established authority is generally supposed to have superior force on its side, intimidation is an easy instrument to employ. It requires no great amount of patience on the part of the ruler, and patience is a rarer quality in rulers than the faculty of commanding force. The means of stimulating fear, moreover, are often subtle: threats of violence not merely, but also, to mention only one field for the exercise of authority, threats of lockouts or blacklists on the one hand, of strikes or boycotts on the other. Yet fear cannot compel obedience. Despite the intimidation of the law and the violence of public officers, incorrigible offenders continue to fill the prisons. Fear cannot even be relied upon to bring about an outward compliance with the wishes of the authorities. Force may prevent active disobedience, but passive resistance remains. open to him who will not obey. Intimidation has filled the pages of history with the sufferings of martyrs from the earliest nonconformists to the latest hunger-strikers, but it has failed to produce compliance. Fear is not as wholesome as sympathy, nor as plastic as deference, nor as persistent as inertia. It may be a powerful, but it is also a limited, means of procuring obedience.

The last cause of obedience is reason. A child may obey (5) Reason because he fears the penalties of disobedience. He does better when he obeys because he understands the reasonableness of obeying. This he cannot do when obedience first becomes necessary for his preservation. As he approaches the years of discretion, it becomes both more possible and more important. If a man were merely rational, and devoid of feeling and sentiment, he would obey whenever obedience was to his interest, and not otherwise. Neither fear nor affection nor habit would influence

Enlightened selfinterest

Disinterestedness

his conduct. There probably are no such men. Enlightened self-interest is merely one of the springs of human conduct. Man is, of course, a more or less selfish as well as a rational animal, and calculations of interest must therefore influence his conduct; but he is also a sociable animal and his conduct cannot be determined by selfish reasons alone.

Nevertheless, the deliberate pursuit of individual interests goes far to explain much of the action of men.1 It is not surprising that some philosophers should neglect all other factors in their explanation of the phenomenon of obedience. Certainly obedience is in many cases directly and immediately to the interest of those whose duty or privilege is to obey. In other cases, however, the advantages of obedience are more indirect and remote and even so uncertain as to be questionable. In still others obedience is plainly injurious. Self-interest, moreover, will lead men of different degrees of intelligence to different courses of action, even when the circumstances are identical. Again, men have to reason in the light of what they know, and their information is generally more or less imperfect. If men were perfectly informed and thoroughly intelligent, the rationalist's ideal of enlightened self-interest might be attained. Men would disobey when, according to the best calculation they could make, the probable mischiefs of resistance, as Bentham put it, appeared less than the probable mischiefs of submission. Otherwise they would obey. This would be true of all those relationships, where some are supposed to be in the habit of paying obedience to others.

Any intelligent man, however, who is pursuing his selfinterest as rationally as he can, will not overlook the fact that he cannot profitably consider his personal interests

1 For an instructive analysis of the effect of interest on opinion, see A. L. Lowell, Public Opinion in War and Peace, pp. 53-55.

alone. If, for example, he is calculating the chances of promoting his happiness by disobeying any one of the established leaders exercising authority over him, he must consider how many others will join him in such an act of disobedience. Unless enough others will also disobey to afford a reasonable prospect that he can disobey with impunity, it will generally be more profitable for him to comply, distasteful as compliance may be. A rational man, therefore, will consider the interests of others as well as his own, and self-interest, so far as questions of obedience are concerned, tends to become confused to some extent with the general welfare. It thus becomes possible for men to act rationally and yet, in a qualified sense of the term, unselfishly. Indeed, many men, whom we call publicspirited or altruistic, may act, quite unconsciously of self, deliberately and rationally, to the best of their knowledge and belief, with single-minded devotion to the general welfare. Nevertheless, their conduct will generally be calculated to promote some particular interest or combination of interests which at the moment they identify with the general welfare.

of interests

Some political philosophers have held the opinion that, The conflict if one knows what a man does, one can infer what that man thinks his interests are. Such an inference is based upon the assumption that man is a thoroughly rational animal and not only can know what will best promote his interests, but also will act upon his knowledge. But men have many interests, and it is not at all certain that every man under similar circumstances would put the same interest first, even if all were equally intelligent and equally wellinformed. Each man is, in a sense, not a single entity but a bundle of selves. One narrow self is primarily interested in food, clothing, and shelter for the body in which the self is incarnated. A broader self is interested in the food, clothing and shelter of the family, of which the individual

The

of rational

opinion

is a member. A yet broader self shares the interests of wider communities, even such abstractions as the justice to establish which states exist and the righteousness which all mankind craves. Nor are one's narrowest interests clear and distinct. As a wage earner a man may share the interests of labor, and as a home owner, those of property. "And so," Lippmann observes in the course of a very penetrating study of public opinion, "while it is so true as to be mere tautology that 'self-interest' determines opinion, the statement is not illuminating until we know which self out of many selects and directs the interests so conceived."1 Practical statesmen, like Hamilton and his Federalist associates in the Convention of 1787, may make their plans on the theory that men can be governed, if their special interests are kept in equilibrium by a balance of power. Other statesmen, no less practical perhaps, may assume that men will co-operate in the service of the state, because they have a sense of common interests which will be best promoted by such co-operation. Neither theory affords a wholly adequate explanation of the fact of political obedience.

We must conclude that the normal man obeys the rulers uncertainty of his state, as he obeys others who exercise authority over him, partly because it is natural for him to do so, partly because he fears to disobey, and partly because obedience seems to him reasonable. The most reasonable men, however, are among those who most distrust their reasoned convictions. Franklin was the greatest American rationalist of the eighteenth century. He was one of the wisest men who took part in the framing of the Constitution of the United States. It was he who finally moved the adoption of that venerable instrument, itself despite its imperfections a great monument to human reason. In doing so, he said: "I confess that there are several parts of this

1 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, Chapter XII, "Self-Interest

Reconsidered."